He drew his knees up to his chest and began to roll even as I leaped over the wrecked altar and reached toward him. I moved to follow as he somersaults down a small slope and passed between two standing stones and into the darkened wood.
As soon as I reached the clearing's edge I saw eyes, hundreds of feral eyes blazing from the darkness at many levels. The incanting grew louder, seemed nearer, seemed to be coming from behind me.
I turned quickly.
The altar was still in wreckage. Another cowled figure stood behind it, much larger than the first. This one was doing the chanting, in a familiar masculine voice. Frakir pulsed upon my wrist. I felt a spell building about me, but this time I was not unprepared. The opposite of my walk, a summons, brought an icy wind that swept the spell away like so much smoke. My garments were lashed about me, changing shape and color. Purple, gray . . . light the trousers and dark the cloak, the shirtfront. Black my boots and wide belt, my gauntlets tucked behind, my silver Frakir woven into a bracelet about my left wrist, visible now and shining. I raised my left hand and shielded my eyes with my right, as I summoned a flash of light.
'Be silent,' I said then. 'You offend me.' The chanting ceased.
The cowl was blown back from his head and I regarded Melman's frightened face.
'All right. You wanted me,' I stated, 'and now you have me, heaven help you. You said that everything would become clear to me. It hasn't. Make it clear.'
I took a step forward.
'Talk!' I said. 'It can be easy or it can be hard. But you will talk. The choice is yours.'
He threw back his head and bellowed: 'Master!'
'Summon your master then, by any means,' I said. 'I will wait. For he, too, must answer.'
He called out again, but there was no answer. He bolted then, but I was ready for this with a major summoning. The woods decayed and fell before he could reach them, and then they moved, were swept up in a mighty wind where there should be stillness. It circled the glade, gray and red, building an impenetrable wall to infinites above and below. We inhabited a circular island in the night, several hundred meters across, its edges slowly crumbling.
'He is not coming,' I said, 'and you are not going. He cannot help you. No one will help you. This is a place of high magic and you profane it with your presence. Do you know what lies beyond the advancing winds? Chaos. I will give you to it now, unless you tell me about Julia and your master and why you dared to bring me here.'
He drew back from the Chaos and turned to face me. 'Take me back to my apartment and I will tell you everything,' he said.
I shook my head.
'Kill me and you will never know.'
I shrugged.
'In that case, you will tell me in order to stop the pain. Then I will give you to the Chaos.'
I moved toward him.
'Wait!' He raised his hand. 'Give me my life for what I am about to tell you.'
'No bargain. Talk.'
The winds swirled around us and our island shrank. Half heard, half intelligible voices babbled within the wind and fragments of forms swam there. Melman drew back from the crumbling edge of things.
'All right,' he said, speaking loudly. 'Yes, Julia came to me, as I had been told she would, and I taught her some things-not the things I would have taught her even a year ago, but pieces of some new things I had only learned myself more recently. I had been told to teach her in this manner, also.'
'By whom? Name your master.' He grimaced.
'He was not so foolish as to give me his name,' he said, 'that I might seek some control over him. Like yourself, he is not human, but a being from some other plane.'
'He gave you the painting of the Tree?' Melman nodded.
'Yes, and it actually transported me to each sephiroth. Magic worked in those places. I gained powers.'
'And the Trumps? He did those, too? He gave them to you to give to her?'
'I don't know anything about any Trumps,' he answered.
'These!' I cried, drawing them from beneath my cloak, spreading them like a conjurer's fan and advancing toward him. I thrust them at him and let him stare for a few moments, withdrawing them before he got the idea that they might represent a means of escape.
'I never saw them before,' he said.
The ground continued its steady erosion toward us. We withdrew to a point nearer the center.
'And you sent the creature that slew her?'
He shook his head vehemently.
'I did not. I knew that she was going to die, for he had told me that that was what would bring you to me. He told me, too, that it would be a beast from Netzach that would slay her-but I never saw it and I had no part in its summoning.'
'And why did he want you to meet me, to bring me here?'
He laughed wildly.
'Why?' he repeated. 'To kill you, of course. He told me that if I could sacrifice you in this place I would gain your powers. He said that you are Merlin, son of Hell and Chaos, and that I would become the greatest mage of all could I slay you here.'
Our world was at best a hundred meters across now, and the rate of its shrinkage was accelerating.
'Was it true?' he asked. 'Would I have gained had I succeeded?'
'Power is like money,' I said. 'You can usually get it if you're competent and it's the only thing you want in life. Would you have gained by it, though? I don't think so.'
'I'm talking about the meaning of life. You know that.'
I shook my head.
'Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning,' I said. 'Enough of this! Describe your master.'
'I never saw him.'
'What?'
'I mean, I saw him but I don't know what he looks like. He always wore a hood and a black trench coat. Gloves, too. I don't even know his race.'
'How did you meet?'
'He appeared one day in my studio. I just turned around and he was standing there. He offered me power, said that he would teach me things in return for my service.'
'How did you know he could deliver?'
'He took me on a journey through places not of this world.'
'I see.'
Our island of existence was now about the size of a large living room.
The voices of the wind were mocking, then compassionate, frightened, sad and angry, too. Our wraparound vision shifted constantly. The ground trembled without letup. The light was still baleful. A part of me wanted to kill Melman right then, but if he had not really been the one who had hurt Julia . . .
'Did your master tell you why he wanted me dead?' I asked him.
He licked his lips and glanced back at the advancing Chaos.
'He said that you were his enemy,' he explained, 'but he never told me why. And he said that it was going to happen today, that he wanted it to happen today.'
'Why today?'
He smiled briefly.
'I suppose because it's Walpurgisnacht,' he replied, 'though he never actually said that.'
'That's all?' I said. 'He never mentioned where he was from?'
'He once referred to something called the Keep of the Four Worlds as if it were important to him.'
'And you never felt that he was simply using you?'
He smiled.
'Of course he was using me,' he replied. 'We all use somebody. That is the way of the world. But he paid
